This film is just one example of the medium’s capacity to hold a mirror up to society through artistic expression. It doesn’t water down the conflicts and contradictions inherent in the hippie movement. The Steppenwolf song at the start of the film, “Born to Be Wild” ( Steppenwolf, 1968), says, “I never want to die.” Later we get a song, as he’s loading the money into the plastic tube and putting it into the gas tank of the chopper, and the song is, “With tombstones in their eyes” (“The Pusher,” Steppenwolf, 1968). There really is no place for them to go but death. We can retire to Florida now, mister.” So if you’re 30 years old, and you’re talking about retiring to Florida? You might as well be dead. But in the campfire scene, right before Wyatt says, “We blew it,” they’ve made that big drug deal. So, why would Easy Rider want to show these guys killed? These rednecks just come out of nowhere. Dennis Hopper wanted that sense of verisimilitude, but he may have been on a lot of drugs while he was behind the scenes directing. That’s the brilliance of that film, even if it’s an uneven movie- largely because they used real marijuana in the scenes. But this movie was critical of the subject matter it was portraying. They were losing a lot of their leaders to drug overdoses, or they were killed in protests, or they got older, and as we get older we become more conservative. When Peter Fonda’s character, Wyatt, says, “We blew it.” Those words echoed across that entire generation of young people in the late 1960’s, who brought this country to the verge of real change, but they were young. Easy Rider celebrates the counterculture only to condemn it at the end.
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